On March 11, three years to the day after the Madrid bombings, a cybercafe in Casablanca was hit. Two terrorists carrying explosive belts entered the cybercafe to surf the web. They were trying to connect to a terrorism-related site, and the manager wanted to prevent them from doing so. When he approached one of the two terrorists, the suicide bomber decided to activate his bomb, killing himself and injuring four. His accomplice fled but was later arrested by Moroccan police. The most credible explanation is that the two terrorists wanted to consult the website in order to receive their orders for an attack against some other target, most likely the police headquarters or some Western interests. But there's no doubt now: Morocco is under attack.
In their new book "Quand le Maroc sera islamiste" (When Morocco will be Islamist), journalists Nicolas Beau and Catherine Graciet paint a very bleak albeit realistic picture of the Kingdom. Indeed, one of the top French anti-terrorism officials, cited by Beau and Graciet, recently stated that Morocco is by far the most worrying country in North Africa. The official's comparison: "today, Morocco is 1916 Russia." Also, according to Spanish anti-terror judge Baltazar Garzon: "Morocco is the worst terrorist threat for Europe." He estimated that the al Qaeda-linked cells number more than 100 and that at least 1,000 terrorists are now being actively sought by Moroccan authorities.
Western intelligence agencies fear specific attacks on Western interests in the country. Some are even warning of a "terrorist tsunami."
In fact, Western intelligence agencies fear specific attacks on Western interests in the country. Some are even warning of a "terrorist tsunami." According to an article in the Algerian daily L'Expression, partially translated by The Croissant, the CIA recently beefed up its presence in Morocco and Algeria. Also, right before this latest incident, Moroccan authorities had closed in on an armed group that was preparing its own attack. The group was composed of 21 Algerians, eight of whom were subsequently arrested--the others are still on the run.
Continued on Page 49
This article starring:
Baltazar Garzon
Catherine Graciet
Nicolas Beau
SAAD HUSEINI
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group
al Qaeda in the Maghreb
Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat
Posted by: Fred ||
03/31/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
In light of this, pardoning might not be such a good idea in the fight against terrorism.
Excellent, Rifkind! HT to Capt Ed
Monday We are out the back of the sprawling presidential compound, having a relaxed afternoon braai. With three US dollars worth of Zimbabwe currency on the fire, the flames have been burning for four hours. And the British say I have harmed this country? Why do my people no longer love me? I demand. What more can I give to them? I am attended by a team of recent graduates from the University of Zimbabwe. They were given the choice of working for me or going to jail. They are all extremely loyal.
My graduates all shrug, and continue gorging themselves on the barbecue. It is a surprise to see them eat this way. They seem to have adopted this European look that has become popular. Grace, my fashionable wife, calls it size zero.
Maybe its an image thing, suggests one. Maybe its time to ditch the moustache. I have a moustache?
Tuesday I cannot see this moustache, although my eyes are not what they were. I would ask my fashionable wife, but she has taken the jumbo jet to Paris to see how many shoes she can get for 20,000 hectares of Matabeleland.
The telephone rings. It is little Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Although I am careful never to exploit this, I am told he is in awe of me, because I am the original hero of southern African independence. Last month he lent me series five of The West Wing on DVD. He keeps calling to ask for it back. You cant have it, I say.
I understand, says Thabo, solemnly. Might I be permitted to ask why?
No, I say. Go away. Little Thabo rings off. Later he rings back to apologise.
Wednesday I am in my compound in Harare, holding a brainstorming session with my graduates. Under pain of death, they have been told to suggest reasons why I might be growing unpopular.
The moustache? suggests one, meekly. I glower at him, and he starts to sweat.
British propaganda! I shout, after a few minutes of silence. Tony Blair and the homosexual British Establishment! It is they who have destroyed this country! The graduates all nod. We agree that the British have consistently presented our abandoned farms, decimated economy, rampaging war veterans and inflation running at 1,800 per cent in a really, really bad light.
Thursday Grace arrives home from Paris. She has bought 6,754 pairs of shoes.
Actually, says one of the more ambitious graduates. Your Excellency has solved the problem of the war veterans. In successfully reducing the life expectancy of Zimbabwe to 37, you have ensured that nobody alive today can have been more than a toddler during our wars of independence.
Yet another unacknowledged triumph! I agree. Perfidious Albion! None of the shoes fit. Grace flies back to Paris.
Friday Seriously, says little Thabo when he calls in the afternoon, I dont mind. I can just buy it again, if I have to. Its just, Im right at the end of series four, and I wondered if . . .
Silence! I shout. A curse on you and your DVDs! Advise me! I am losing my country! What can I do to be popular again?
Thabo falls silent. Well, he says eventually. You could always lose the moustache. Its a little odd. Some people say it is a bit too much like Hitlers.
I dont even have a moustache! I shout.
Of course you dont, agrees Thabo. Sorry. *
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/31/2007 10:04 ||
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It won't be long before this animal will be living on the high hog in exile.
#1
Many Amers also doubted Britain's ability during the FALKLANDS Crisis but Britain did her thingy anyway. In any case, in a democracy the people get the kind of Govt. they want, i.e. are ultimately responsible for the strengths or wekanesses of said governance. Govt. is supposed to be reflection of the society being governed, correct?
#2
Joe, that was then and this is now...the Brits have greatly diminished.
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/31/2007 1:28 Comments ||
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#3
JM: Many Amers also doubted Britain's ability during the FALKLANDS Crisis but Britain did her thingy anyway.
With a lot of American help in logistics and surveillance. We could have staged Iraqi Freedom without them. They couldn't have staged the Falklands without us.
#4
It appears as though, without any American help, Britain is going to have to suck hind tit. No way to put boots on the ground, no navy to enforce a blockade, no spine to simply bomb out key infrastructure. Hit their refineries and Iran's tune will change in a heartbeat. The article even makes mention of them. Why is this being treated as such an obscure point?
#5
True, Basij elements murdered a female activist of Iranian descent, who had attained Canadian citizenship, and Canada could do nothing but make diplomatic protests.
I was in Canada when that happened. IIRC, she was a reporter who was first brutally raped then beaten to death. The Canadians we met who knew about it were all very unhappy. I remember one of them saying that not only could Canada not help us in Iraq, she couldn't even help her own citizens overseas because she simply didn't have the military force to do so.
A number of people also told me that Chretien would have been better off telling the world that he would have helped in Iraq if Canada had possessed the troops to do so but that the cupboard was bare. In that person's opinion, Chretien took the anti-war stance simply out of embarrassment at not being able to help.
Posted by: Mac ||
03/31/2007 4:40 Comments ||
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#7
That last line Mac if true, is a damn sad story.
#8
It all comes from being on the military dole since '45. It should be a wake up call, but the arrogant moral intellectual bankrupt governing class would rather shift the chairs on the deck of the Titanic rather than acknowledge that theyve buried Western European Civilization. Tack on the cesspool hatred of their protector for nearly fifty years, and theyve even achieved the ability to alienate the sole means to save their collective asses and buy them a little more time. Life is tough. Its a lot tougher if youre stupid.
The Brits purchased cruise missiles. Small kilotonnage yields about five miles above Tehran and Qum at 4 oclock in the morning as the one and only warning would of course get quick results. They have the means. However, the parties to be have already surrendered by lacking not only the will, but the perception of even having the will. And the barbarian knows it.
#12
If anyone here has free time - an near impossibility these days - I would recommend use of Google's book download facility. They have copied almost 200,000 non-copyright protected books, most of which have sat unused in library crawlspace for decades. If you want to learn of the depthless depravity of Islam, search "Gordon" "Soudan," for classics works on the Mahdi revolt of the late 19th century. British imperial troops and Egyptian allies marched against what they thought was a tiny insurgency led by a Koranimal who thought he was the "messiah" in pursuit of the anti-Christ (Western leaders). As they approached, the entire allied army was massacred. Response? They played the "islam is peace" card, and conducted delicate sweeps of the genocidal maniacs, delivering power to so called moderate islamutts in the process. Then they called what amounted to a status quo ante - less only the "messiah" - a great victory. Even a quick scan of some of the material will convince anyone with an open mind that we cannot appease the viral ancesters of these savages. We have to hit them until they have nothing to hit back with.
DEAR David Hicks/Abu Muslim Australia/Abu Muslim Australii/Abu Muslim Philippines/Mohammed Dawood/Ade Laide Daewoo/Ali Baba Yabba Dabba Doo,
We the undersigned wish to register our anger and disgust at your guilty plea before the unlawful kangaroo court convened illegally at the unconstitutional Guantanamo Bay gulag by illicit operatives of unelected US imperialist-in-chief George Warpig Bush.
We've worked long and hard to secure your freedom only to have you throw all our effort down the toilet by ... attempting to secure your freedom. The injustice is sickening.
While we were fiercely protesting the endless delays to your court appearance and bravely ignoring the fact these delays were caused by your own legal team, you were apparently plotting all along to plead guilty in a sinister bid to return as quickly as possible to Australia.
All of us who campaigned so long for your quick return to Australia are reeling at this slap in the face.
Do you know how many people you've let down, David/Abu/Mohammed/Ade/Ali?
Think about the poor protesters in Brisbane who were chanting and shrieking and carrying on as best they could when news reached them of your craven cave-in.
According to one heartbreaking media report: "Anti-war protesters in orange jumpsuits marching in Brisbane's city centre Tuesday were stunned by the news of David Hicks' guilty plea ... there was a palpable air of disappointment among those who had vigorously campaigned to bring Hicks home.'' Your attempt to be brought home has palpably - palpably! - disappointed them.
All they wanted from you, David, was for you to stay in your cell so they could keep agitating for your freedom. Now they have nothing. And what's the deal with you showing up in court all fat and jolly? We've been banging on for years here about how you're emaciated and hollow-cheeked and pale from lack of sunlight, and then you go and turn up looking ... well, let's quote a few witnesses here:
"Chubby.''
"Puffy.''
"(Like) a small version of Ozzy Osbourne.''
"Overweight.''
"Fitter.''
"Tanned.''
Man, thanks so much for all of that, Dave. You know, it was only in January you were telling your lawyers Guantanamo Bay was "like a Nazi concentration camp''.
Turns out you were staying in the only Nazi concentration camp on Earth where a five-year stay not only keeps you alive but makes you put on weight (10 kilos, according to most reliable accounts). Were Bush's minions torturing you with pies? Did they subject you to the dreaded bernaise sauce treatment?
Knowing you'd be facing court and the world media, was it too much to ask that you just say no to a fourth creme brulee?
We the undersigned are revolted and upset and, to be brutally honest, now drooling with hunger like old labradors.
But our problems amount to nothing compared to the nightmare your steadfast supporter Kevin Rudd must now endure.
Labor leader Rudd - a good man, a kind man, a Hicks man - has barracked for you ceaselessly.
And what have you done to him with your selfish guilty plea? Why, you've turned him into some type of babbling wordspout.
Just look at what Rudd had to say after you had 'fessed up:
"On the question of the detail of what Mr Hicks has pled and what response will be delivered to that in terms of the next stage of the legal process on the settlement of the facts and on the determination of any sentence and on the application of any appeal process, let alone the application of the International Prisoner Transfer Agreement which might flow from that, these are all delicate processes still to be worked through.'' Read that again, if you can, David, through your burning tears of shame. Those aren't the words of a smooth-talking soon-to-be prime minister, the sort of clever fellow able to easily exchange bons mot even with David Koch.
These are the words of a man pushed to the point of madness by your duplicity. Like all of us, Rudd thought he could trust you.
Did you know that Rudd lives in a car? Kind of puts your situation in perspective, doesn't it. He lives in a car because non-Muslim capitalists forced him from his land like a common Palestinian refugee.
And another thing, Mr Hicks/Australia/Australii/Philippines/Dawood/Daewoo/Doo _ if indeed that is your real name - our feminist sisters in Dykes for David want to have a quiet word about this letter of yours to an old flatmate: "Listen, have you got any friends I can f... when I get home? They have to be good-looking and I prefer big tits as well. Well, send their photos with the letters so I can check them out ...''
You'll wish you were back in Gitmo once the sisterhood gets through with you, David. As do we all.
Yours in perpetual struggle,
The Free David Hicks Coalition
Hicks Liberation Front
The Coalition for Freeing David Hicks
Hicks for the Senate
United People for the Freedom of David Hicks
Port Adelaide Football Club
#2
We've worked long and hard to secure your freedom only to have you throw all our effort down the toilet by ... attempting to secure your freedom. The injustice is sickening.
While we were fiercely protesting the endless delays to your court appearance and bravely ignoring the fact these delays were caused by your own legal team, you were apparently plotting all along to plead guilty in a sinister bid to return as quickly as possible to Australia.
All of us who campaigned so long for your quick return to Australia are reeling at this slap in the face.
Bwahahahahaha!!! Must hurt like Hell when the idol you worship turns out not to be a golden calf but a fatted one instead.
Hard hitting analysis by the former Indian Punjab Police Chief who crushed the Sikh insurgency in the 1980s
Pakistan is an idea that has failed - abysmally and comprehensively. The lawlessness of Government, the unending violence, the contempt for civilised norms of domestic and international conduct, the constant regression to primitive forms of mass mobilisation, are all delayed and protracted manifestations of the fundamental and complete failure of the idea of Pakistan.
This failure was evident in the very first years after the birth of the country out of the falsehood of the 'two nation theory' and the bloody slaughters of Partition. Within six year of Independence, the poet Faiz Ahmed 'Faiz' wrote, in his poignant and evocative Subh-e-Azadi (The Dawn of Freedom): "This tainted light, this gloom-smothered dawn / This is not the dawn we had hoped for... The despondent night still lies heavy upon us / The moment of deliverance from bondage is yet to come..." Faiz spent years in Pakistani jails and in exile, reviled, excluded and marginalised by successive regimes, till his death in 1984. The tragic destiny of one of the greatest lights of modern Urdu literature is symbolic of all the good that may have survived the catastrophic creation of Pakistan in the crucible of communal hatred.
If anything, Mohammed Ali Jinnah's oft-quoted and pathetic perorations in Pakistan's still-born Constituent Assembly, underline Pakistan's inherent contradictions. After years of exploiting and abusing the Islamic identity and the idea of jihad to fulfil his personal ambitions, and eventually to create the world's first Islamist ideological state, Jinnah declared, on August 11, 1947, "You may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state... in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims - not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual - but in a political sense as citizens of one state..."
That Jinnah was a pork-eating, whiskey-bibbing atheist does little to mitigate his cynical instrumentalisation of Islam, even as, today, Gen Pervez Musharraf's Western suits, public advocacy of 'moderation' and the fact that he keeps a dog as a pet cannot alter the fact that he finds it politically expedient to support Islamist terrorist groups, and himself secured much of his support (though this may be waning) from the Islamist fundamentalist constituency.
Whatever the personal beliefs or proclivities of leaders in Pakistan, their practices have invariably played upon and reinforced extremism, producing a politics dominated by obscurantism, on the one hand, and authoritarianism, on the other. Indeed, the 'ideology of Pakistan' precludes the possibility of a secular democratic politics - as any such movement would easily be construed as an attack on Islam itself. The purported 'threat to Islam' has been the essence of political mobilisation from pre-Partition days to the present, and there is, given the present social, political and strategic architecture of Pakistan, no possibility of its dilution in the foreseeable future. Indeed, Pakistan's intervention in Kashmir has exponentially deepened these proclivities, as Jean-Luc Racine notes, putting "incompleteness and exteriority at the heart of its national vision".
The depth to which these elements have become rooted in the institutional, political and social structures in Pakistan is seldom understood by outsiders, who think they can tweak the system here and there - a little madarsa reform, a few hundred million in 'development' aid - and secure the transformation of Pakistan's historical pathologies into a modern and functioning democracy. Unfortunately, the reality of Pakistan is that it cannot lend itself to incremental reform. For the past nearly six years, the West has pumped in billions of dollars in the hope that it can purchase reform and moderation in this country, but these years have seen nothing but a continuous expansion of both obscurantist and authoritarian tendencies.
The Pakistani identity is based on irreducible opposites, an adversarial ideology that initially saw the Hindu as the enemy, but that has thereafter added a multiplicity of 'hostile others' - Ahmedias, Shias, internal regional minorities, the West - in its expanding circle of strife. Much of the violence in the South Asian region - and indeed, a large proportion of Islamist terrorism across the world - finds its roots in this psyche, rather than in any concrete and coherent strategic objectives or interests. Unless the institutional basis of this ideology, the power structure and sections of society that have historically profited from it, are dismantled, Pakistan's pathologies will continue to compound themselves, only occasionally tempered by objective external circumstances and a loss of capacities.
Pakistan's leaders have long committed the country to a course that can only have disastrous consequences for the nation, and unfortunate consequences for the region. Snared in a self-perpetuating dynamic, Pakistan itself cannot generate the means to escape this predicament. Unless strong and sustained external interventions, coherently directed at re-engineering the power relations in Pakistan, and at demolishing the ideological state, are not evolved, Pakistan will continue to grow into a bigger problem, both for itself and for the world.
Such a strategy is not directed 'against Pakistan' as a nation, or 'against the people of Pakistan' - who are the first and most helpless victims of the prevailing conditions. To understand what is being suggested, it is useful to take the analogy of another ideological state - the Soviet Union - which, at one time, sought to export its ideology across the world through movements of mass mobilisation and violence. The collapse of the Soviet Union was engineered through a slow strategy of internal erosion and unsustainable defence competition with the West. But when that collapse came, the unyielding hostility and suspicion between the so-called Eastern Bloc and the West simply evaporated, as did one of the principal sources of international tension since the Second World War.
Pakistan is no Soviet Union. The threat of global terror that currently emanates from Pakistani soil is disruptive and disturbing, but it wanes into insignificance against the threat of 'mutually assured destruction' with which the polarised Soviet and Western blocs confronted the world. 'Re-engineering' Pakistan will be a challenging task, but it is far from the impossibility that we imagine. It's time the world, and particularly Pakistan's neighbours, recognised that this, and not the various false dichotomies that we have constructed out of our own worst nightmares - Gen Musharraf or chaos; the military or the jihadis - is the real choice and strategy of resolution
Posted by: John Frum ||
03/31/2007 00:00 ||
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Gen Pervez Musharraf's Western suits, public advocacy of 'moderation' and the fact that he keeps a dog as a pet ...
So, when they call Musharraf a Western lackey and running dog, they actually do mean it.
The Pakistani identity is based on irreducible opposites, an adversarial ideology that initially saw the Hindu as the enemy, but that has thereafter added a multiplicity of 'hostile others' - Ahmedias, Shias, internal regional minorities, the West - in its expanding circle of strife. Much of the violence in the South Asian region - and indeed, a large proportion of Islamist terrorism across the world - finds its roots in this psyche, rather than in any concrete and coherent strategic objectives or interests. Unless the institutional basis of this ideology, the power structure and sections of society that have historically profited from it, are dismantled, Pakistan's pathologies will continue to compound themselves, only occasionally tempered by objective external circumstances and a loss of capacities.
That one paragraph locks down just about all the main points about Pakistan. Like the deteriorating downward spiral of a pathological paranoiac, Pakistan's circle of perceived enemies slowly widens to engulf the entire outside world.
#3
The depth to which these elements have become rooted in the institutional, political and social structures in Pakistan is seldom understood by outsiders, who think they can tweak the system here and there - a little madarsa reform, a few hundred million in 'development' aid - and secure the transformation of Pakistan's historical pathologies into a modern and functioning democracy. Unfortunately, the reality of Pakistan is that it cannot lend itself to incremental reform
Posted by: John Frum ||
03/31/2007 7:36 Comments ||
Top||
#4
"You may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state... in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims - not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual - but in a political sense as citizens of one state..."
Eyewash or did he believe it? If he believed it, then jeeeeebus did he blick things up.
#6
Despite Pakistan's glaring problems, I was enlightened a while back on the general consensus in India that Pakistan is a "gnat". This prejudice means that they may be too close to the situation to see it clearly.
Personally, I think that long ago, the US convinced Perv that by planning with us, we could develop a mutually desirable situation. It would take years, and would be very gradual, but it would end up with Perv becoming the ruler of his entire country, instead of just the leader of the most powerful faction.
At the same time, we pointed out that his enemies are also our enemies, so that as they lost power, we both gained.
Well duh. The notable thing about Islamic shitholes, generally speaking IMHO, is how they are almost completely self-absorbed. Their hatred of infidels and All Things Non-Islamic is surpassed by their hatred of each other, sect on sect, faction on faction. But nukes set the Pakis apart as an entity which MUST eventually be completely eliminated. Period. Nothing else will ever suffice - and it must be done before they give 'em to every other Muzzy or Enemy of My Enemy who passes their Insanity Muster.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
